AIML - Senior Data Engineer, Machine Learning Platform Technologies

Overview

Join us in building the machine learning platform that enables teams at Apple to build Apple Intelligence and many other intelligent experiences across hardware, software and service products.

Description

As a Machine Learning Data Platform Engineer, you'll design and build the scalable dataset management platform that enables teams across Apple to discover, curate, version, share, process, and consume ML datasets with enterprise-grade compliance and governance. We're looking for an engineer with deep expertise in big data infrastructure and a passion for building platforms that make ML practitioners more productive. You'll work at the intersection of large-scale data systems, ML workflows, and data governance. In this role, you'll be architecting and building Apple\'s next-generation ML dataset management platform. This platform enables ML teams across the company to efficiently manage the full lifecycle of datasets, from initial curation and annotation through versioning, model training and evaluation, sharing, and compliance. You\'ll design scalable infrastructure that supports dataset operations at massive scale while maintaining strong governance guarantees. Your work will include building data lineage tracking systems, implementing automated compliance workflows, creating intuitive APIs and SDKs for dataset access, and ensuring seamless integration with ML training and evaluation pipelines. You\'ll collaborate with teams building customer-facing ML features across iOS, macOS, and other Apple platforms, as well as compute infrastructure teams and ML framework owners. Your platform work directly enables the ML innovations that millions of customers experience daily. This role offers the opportunity to have broad impact across Apple\'s ML initiatives and to shape how thousands of ML practitioners build the intelligent experiences our customers love.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor\'s degree in Computer Science, related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years building and scaling data infrastructure for petabyte-scale ML workloads with high reliability
• Deep expertise in modern data technologies (Apache Iceberg, Spark, S3, distributed systems), data modeling, schema evolution, and efficient storage formats (Parquet, Arrow, ORC)
• Experience building data pipelines that handle diverse ML data types: structured/tabular data, unstructured media (images, video, audio), embeddings, and multimodal datasets
• Proven track record building dataset management systems including versioning, metadata management, discovery, and integration with production ML training pipelines
• Experience designing data governance frameworks including lineage tracking, access control, retention policies, and compliance workflows
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and container orchestration (Kubernetes)
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills to understand diverse stakeholder needs and articulate technical decisions across ML engineering, data science, legal, and product teams

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience curating or managing datasets for production ML models
• Experience with data cataloging systems, metadata platforms, MLOps tools, or ML training frameworks
• Knowledge of privacy-preserving technologies and data quality/validation frameworks

Pay & Benefits

At Apple, base pay is one part of our total compensation package and is determined within a range. This provides the opportunity to progress as you grow and develop within a role. The base pay range for this role is between $212,000 and $318,400, and your base pay will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location.

Apple employees also have the opportunity to become an Apple shareholder through participation in Apple’s discretionary employee stock programs. Apple employees are eligible for discretionary restricted stock unit awards, and can purchase Apple stock at a discount if voluntarily participating in Apple’s Employee Stock Purchase Plan. You’ll also receive benefits including: Comprehensive medical and dental coverage, retirement benefits, a range of discounted products and free services, and for formal education related to advancing your career at Apple, reimbursement for certain educational expenses — including tuition. Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary bonuses or commission payments as well as relocation. Learn more about Apple Benefits.

Note: Apple benefit, compensation and employee stock programs are subject to eligibility requirements and other terms of the applicable plan or program.

Apple is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. We seek to promote equal opportunity for all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. Learn more about your EEO rights as an applicant.

Apple accepts applications to this posting on an ongoing basis.